bad metrics are hiding problems.
by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 research
if there’s one nice thing about phoning the irs, it’s the opportunity to take a nap.
taxpayer naps were a little shorter this year, especially for those calling 35 of the 102 toll-free lines, known as enterprise lines, that taxpayers can call for assistance. those 35 lines are for accounts management (am) issues.
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thanks to a mandate from the secretary of the treasury, the irs hired 7,000 customer service representatives to handle the am lines.
one result: average time on hold for the 35 am lines was only three minutes.
another result: service on the other 67 lines saw no such improvement, and in some cases, service was worse. at the same time, a shift of employees to the am lines from other services, such as responding to correspondence, resulted in slower service there.
21 minutes on hold
though wait times for 28 million calls to am lines were short, only 32 percent of the calls were answered by an irs employee. somehow that resulted in an 88 percent level of service (los).
but what about the 12 million calls to non-am lines? only 29 percent were answered by an employee, and average time on hold was an infuriating 21 minutes, resulting in an los of just 36 percent.
eighty-eight percent los ain’t bad. but 36 percent ain’t good.
and those are the numbers for the 3.5 months of the 2024 filing season. during the other 8.5 months of the year, los for the am lines was only 40 percent.
and on top of that, “level of service” really doesn’t mean much, according national taxpayer advocate erin m. collins.
materially misleading
collins has several gripes about the los as an effective measurement of actual service.
- the los measure is materially misleading. first of all, the 88 percent los does not mean 88 percent of calls were answered. it merely gives that impression. and it gives no indication of customer satisfaction, confidence, trust, effectiveness, quality, efficiency or the ability to resolve issues.
- the great los on am calls indicates nothing about the poor los on all other calls.
- the los numbers are deceptive. one percent of calls to the refund hotline were answered by an employee. los: 77 percent. thirty percent of calls to individual income tax services were answered. los: 87 percent.
- the los indicates nothing about whether an issue was resolved.
- the los doesn’t consider whether a customer reached a customer service representative. many who wished to just got shunted to an automated response that may not have resolved anything.
- using los goals to determine resources dedicated to them is not an efficient way to target those resources. investing resources elsewhere may well improve service more.
- the los measure involves many variables that can be manipulated to improve am los – the one that treasury wants to see – at the expense of others. for example, the installment agreement/balance due phone line was under the am umbrella until too many calls came in, with an average on-hold time of 23 minutes, messing up the am los average. the solution? the line was no longer included as an am line.
- to hit the mandated am los goal, the irs moved people to the phones and away from other jobs. there were therefore plenty of csrs during peak call times. but at less busy times, 34 percent of their time was spent doing nothing. antiquated technology did not allow them to shift between phone work and other work. the los measure did not reflect other customer services that weren’t getting done.
“let’s think differently”
“to summarize, there is a well-known business principle that ‘you get what you measure,’” collins wrote in her annual “objectives report to congress: fiscal year 2025.” “… let’s not throw bodies at the problem. let’s think differently … the am los is not the best, or even a good, barometer of taxpayer service.”